The Poor People's Campaign Calls Out 'Policy Violence'

In a new article in The Nation, Greg Kaufmann writes, "The [Poor People's] Campaign wants to advance a new understanding of poverty as a traumatic experience inflicted by policy-makers."

Highlighting work done by Children's HealthWatch, the campaign rallied to raise awareness of the indelible mark that growing up in poverty can leave on brains and bodies:

Policy choices indeed leave an indelible physical and social-emotional mark on people in both the near and long term—there is no shortage of studies that shine a light on that fact. Children’s HealthWatch, a network of pediatricians and public-health researchers in urban hospitals across the country, examines the impacts of policy on the health, nutrition, and development of children ages 0 to 4, and often on their caregivers too. “These policies don’t happen in a vacuum,” said Stephanie Ettinger de Cuba, executive director of the organization. “They are written on the bodies and brains of the family.”

Dr. Mariana Chilton, principal investigator for Children’s HealthWatch in Philadelphia, put it this way: “The experience of poverty in and of itself is a violent, traumatic experience, and it’s inflicted by policy-makers and our own society.”